REVIEW: Dracula – Malvern Theatres (Tuesday, January 14 to Saturday, January 18).
Showtime! stars rating: * * *
OBSERVING the top-hatted individual lurking in the shadows on the programme cover, I assumed Bram Stoker’s horror classic was to be given the full Gothic monty.
I waited in vain. Or maybe that should that read ‘vein’. Because it’s clear that fangs ain’t wot they used t’be.
For despite an ever-accelerating vampire fest, there’s not a canine toothy-peg to be seen. Incisors are most definitely out, rather than in.
The Dracula story is said to have been based on the legend of Vlad the Impaler, a 15th century eastern European tyrant king who had the charming habit of kebabbing his enemies on sharpened poles.
Presumably he had become tired of making do with the more customary squares of cheddar and pineapple chunks, a buffet staple that only went out of fashion at the end of the 1970s.
I should perhaps point out at this stage that after extensive research, I have found absolutely no ancestral thread that links bad lad Vlad to the present day Reeves the Impala who, as we know, has shafted more than a million British pensioners.
This impressive skewering tally clearly dwarfs Vlad’s puny total of 80,000 people given the cocktail treatment.
All right, now that link has been ruled out, let’s get down to Blackeyed Theatre’s take on Stoker’s ripping yarn.
Jonathan Harker (Pele Kelland-Beau) leaves his wife Mina (Maya-Nika Bewley) in England and pops over to Transylvania to sew up a house deal with Count Dracula (David Chafer and Richard Keightley). As you do.
No, you’re not seeing double – there’s lots of role swapping in this production, so much so that it can get rather confusing at times. Anyway, is this a case of RightMove? More like WrongMove, oh yes indeed.
For the hapless house-hunter should have stayed at home, as he now finds himself incarcerated in Drac’s pad. And the grim truth has slowly begun to sink in, long before the grim teeth have started to do the same thing.
Eventually, he is freed and returns to the couple's London home. Unfortunately for everyone else, their erstwhile vendor follows him, and upon arriving in the capital, embarks on an orgy of blood awash with more haemoglobin than a Bilston black pudding factory.
But the trouble is though that I just didn’t feel it. You know, that sense of terror. My heart didn’t miss a single beat. Maybe I'd also been gnawed. I just don't know.
I fully realise that we can’t bring Christopher Lee back from the undead – there would be too much at stake here – but surely, we could all have been treated to some really horrifying blood-drenched dentition activity. Gore blimey, guvnor, it’s not rocket science, is it?
Nevertheless, Blackeyed Theatre’s interpretation of this time-worn tale still manages to maintain the tension and sense of dread, with a supremely talented cast ably getting their teeth into director Nick Lane’s approach to the story.
Of course, nothing stands still. Perhaps one day, we might see a veggie Dracula, content to stick his non-binary chops into a terrified nut roast. It’s called change.
But while accepting that this is a well-acted piece of theatre, I nevertheless feel that directors who stray too far from the original perhaps do so at their peril.
i have seen plenty of great plays at malvern over the years. Dracula was not one of them. i just found it uninspiring, the references to the evil british empire and the diversions from the bram stoker novel were poor decisions. relieved to make it to the end without nodding off.